News Alert: President Endorses Democrat; Is Impeached

By Marc Ambinder

The actions taken by White House advisers Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina correspond directly to the following scenarios: the president, at some point during his presidency, decides to campaign for a Democratic candidate. The president, at some point during his presidency, castigates Republicans and urges people to vote for Democrats. The president endorses a candidate in a competitive primary. Or this tongue-in-cheek example, from Rutgers prof. David Greenberg:

It is discovered that Obama headlined a fundraiser for a Democratic congressional candidate. The GOP cries foul. The press quotes experts saying that while many other presidents have done the exact same thing, Obama promised us something other than business as usual, and that the story--coming on top of the Sestak and Romanoff stories and "Endorsement-Gate" (see above item)--could damage him and even cost the Democrats in the midterms.

These are unremarkable events in our political system because the
president is dual-hatted, and because our politics are organized around
a two-party system where one party gains power by getting more votes
than another. I will grant that the statutes themselves can be
interpreted in such a
way as to prohibit virtually all political activity by anyone remotely
connected with the executive branch. But practice -- and not simply
underhanded practice, but open, above-board practice, since the time
those laws were written suggests that the law's authors intended them
as a bulwark against official corruption, not against the mixing of
politics and policy. In other words, if you apply an originalist
reading of these statutes, you will not end up with anything remotely
resembling an indictable offense.
What keeps this story alive is the media's feeding off the energy that
can be generated from
deliberately misconstruing the law and its intent.

It would be absurd to construe 18 USC Section 600
as anything other than a law designed to prevent presidents from
appointing their friends to office in exchange for doing or not doing
something on behalf of the president or someone else.

In neither the Sestak nor the Romanoff example were either candidate
threatened with harm for not doing something; they were simply
presented with alternatives. (In Romanoff's case, the jobs were
alternatives he sought out!) For Romanoff, there is no quid pro quo
because the quid is this case is required for the quo (an
administration job that HE sought ought), the quid (running for Senate)
would have to be ruled out completely. For Sestak, the White House was
simply attempting to nudge him out of a race. No one threatened him
with anything, even implicitly. In neither case were the races
themselves interfered with.

(This is also the response to accusations that a bribe was offered:
"the job offer, however, is hardly a 'bribe' when it is one of two
alternatives that are mutually exclusive." Sestak was offered nothing
of value; Romanoff had expressed interest in the job. It is simply not
illegal for the White House to offer him an alternative to running
against their preferred candidate. There is a reason why no one has
ever been prosecuted for this crime.

Making this distinction is critical, because the moment
these claims are treated as valid claims, rather than
politically-motivated cant, is the moment that they become legitimate
facts worthy of a debate, and of news coverage. See this story in USA Today: "Obama
under fire for election tactics by Sestak, Romanoff." Under fire ...
because USA Today has decided that the charges warrant the label.

There are a few other canards to dispense
with. In the Washington Post this morning, Republican attorneys William
Rivkin and David Burke argue that
the White House counsel is incapable of investigating allegations like
these, and that a special counsel ought to be appointed. This is the
same Rivkin who argued strenuously against
the appointment of a special counsel to investigate claims that Scooter
Libby leaked Valerie Plame's identity to reporters. Rivkin claims that
the White House counsel cannot reliably investigate potential criminal
misconduct among members of the White House staff because of his
inherent conflict of interest. But that presumes that every allegation
made by a credible political actor of misconduct automatically merits a
much wider investigation, because in Rivkin's word there is no real way
of distinguishing between a nothingburger and a sumptuous feast unless
every single allegation, no matter how transparently silly, is given
the same amount of attention. This is a convenient way to tie the White
House up in knots as they investigate allegations and their spandrels.

Some
more savvy pundits are using the incident to describe the White House
political operation as weak and ineffectual. But it ignores the reason
WHY this White House political operation is not strong. That's because
it was never designed to be strong; it was not designed to be
heavy-handed. AND Obama's team has resisted exerting the type
of pressure on lawmakers and candidates that previous administration
political teams have, or the environment is such that the White
House has no political leverage over candidates and lawmakers. Nothing
here smacks of mean-machine-patronage style politics, which is what
Chicago is famous for. As I've written before, if the gentle, casual,
non-penalizing Sestak-Romanoff job offers exemplify Chicago politics,
then give Chicago more of that politics!

The
media ecosystem is such that the denials and fact-checking and common
sense will serve to reinforce the conviction (if it, indeed, is real)
by those making these allegations that there must be something to the
story. A casual question will easily morph into a call for Obama to be
placed under oath (and asked what, exactly?) ... or for him to be
impeached. To those casually paying attention, the offense is worse.

More potentially pernicious than liberal bias, than the false
equivalences bias, than really just about any other bias that
journalism that injects into a public discussion of a story, is the power
that comes from merely selecting which subjects to cover. Whatever the
collection of facts about White House officials attempting to influence
primary elections is, it is not a scandal. It is not the type of story
that journalists with credibility and experience should be selecting to
cover. It's the type of story that journalists ought to resist
covering, precisely because the act of giving it attention elevates the
arguments that don't correspond with the truth. If journalism is good
for anything, it is to provide what Republican Bruce Bartlett calls
"quality control" over the narrative. Well, a big mess just slipped by.

Where the White House erred is obvious. In claiming to hold themselves to an ethereal, fairly impossible ethical standard, they are partly responsible for the casual criminalization of regular political discourse. In some ways, this White House has been more transparent and more committed to generally accepted ethical practices. Although Obama never promised to abstain from politics, he invited some of this scrutiny by refusing to delineate what he found acceptable and what he did not. But this is a venial sin compared to the transgressions of organized journalism.